LootLocker on raising $2.5m to connect whole game catalogues with communities

• LootLocker is evolving from developer tools to a publisher platform linking game catalogues and managing player relationships across titles.
• The company has raised $2.5 million and added former Bethesda and ZeniMax executive Jonathan Lander to help shape its focus on connected publishing.
• By treating portfolios as ecosystems rather than isolated releases, LootLocker aims to help publishers cut acquisition costs, boost retention, and build loyalty.

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For years, publishers have treated each new release like a fresh start, building an audience, running ads, and hoping to win back players who already love their other games. LootLocker wants to change that. The Stockholm-based backend platform, which powers more than 10,000 live games, is evolving beyond developer tools to become a connective layer for publishers: a system designed to link entire catalogues, communicate with players, and guide fans from one title to the next. 

It’s a shift backed by $2.5 million in new funding and the arrival of former Bethesda and ZeniMax executive Jonathan Lander, whose appointment signals LootLocker’s ambitions to become core infrastructure for connected publishing.

CEO and co-founder Alexander Bergendahl describes it as the next step for a company that began by solving everyday headaches for indie developers. Having built and launched his own free-to-play game, Bergendahl saw firsthand the power of communicating directly with players, and the frustration of being locked out of that relationship by platforms.

“Steam wants the players to be Steam’s,” he explains. “But if we know your Steam ID, why not reward you for playing more than one of our games?” LootLocker’s answer is to give publishers the tools to do precisely that: to connect, engage, and reward players across their portfolio.

That philosophy resonated with Jonathan Lander, whose experience running live service operations at CCP Games, Bethesda, and ZeniMax Online showed him the value of a unified player view. “At Bethesda, we wanted to know who our players were across Fallout, Elder Scrolls, DOOM, and Dishonored,” he says. “But PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam all owned that data. LootLocker is building what we wished we’d had then – a way to identify people, understand their journey across titles, and have a genuine conversation with them every time they fire up a game.”

From discovery to community

“The most obvious challenge of a mature market is the sheer quantity of games,” Alexander Bergendahl tells us. “That makes things harder for everyone. There’s a massive funnel of games being made and small storefronts for people to find things on. There are always games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft, not to mention other live-service games. And now we have things like TikTok, which replicate that dopamine hit and easy engagement. There is more of everything happening, and more attention is being sought after.”

As the tools needed to make and publish games have become democratised, the barriers to making a game have never been lower, but the competition for an individual's time has never been greater. Making a game is only the first step, and then you’re faced with the challenge of discovery. Community plays a huge role in that. 

Alexander Bergendahl moderates a panel in San Francisco this year about the future of game development tools.

“You've had to innovate on how you get your game into players’ hands,” continues Bergendahl. “What does it mean to have a relationship with your players? What roles do the platforms, publishers and developers play in this? With the saturation of so many games and so much noise, the publisher needs to do more than have a good publishing strategy. They need to have a better connection with their players.”

From his experience building the free-to-play sports game SNOW, he saw the impact of having a direct relationship with the community. “We were very early on Discord,” he says, “And we had tools in-game to communicate with them. Even as a small team, we had the tools on the back-end to be able to reward and engage players. It was a little bit more self-service back then, but if I saw someone playing our game on a Twitch stream, I could message them and give them something in the game.”

Having that freedom and ability to link the dev team to a player made a difference for them as a small team. “That's why we started LootLocker, and that's what we've continued to do. We've built out tools for developers and publishers to be able to have a direct relationship with their players,” says Bergendahl, pointing out that ideally, this can happen within the game (Discord and forums are crowded) and operate between games from the same publisher.

Jonathan Lander concurs. “If you think about it, marketing and communication is not traditionally what developers are used to. They wouldn’t worry about having a conversation with the player,” he says. “You’re asking them to step outside of an area where they’re not an expert. What you need is to talk to your pool of players through your game, which, by the way, is much more effective than email clickthroughs!”

Retention instead of acquisition

And this ability to directly address the player becomes really powerful when you have more than one game in your catalogue. “It’s really hard to attract people; user acquisition costs are super high,” agrees Lander. So not only does it make sense to do what you can to keep a player engaged in a game once you have them, there’s also an opportunity to encourage that player to check out your other games. If a player is going to churn, it’s better if they churn into one of your other titles, and you can make that process a joyful one if they are rewarded for doing that, and you guide them on the process. 

“Most publishers have a strong back catalogue of games and they often have one or two tentpole games that are still driving the majority of their revenue,” says Bergendahl. “But they have very little way of communicating with those players. Our whole publisher angle is that you have these players sitting there, playing that game every day. Why not implement something so you can communicate with them in that game? And then give them a reason to try the sequel or a new game that they might like – and actually reward them when they go play that new game, with something in either or both of the games?”

Lander adds, “If you’re a Fallout 4 person, maybe you would be interested in Fallout 3. You can check if they own Fallout 3 already, and then, because it’s important to us, we can give them a discount if they try Fallout 3 now. We can highlight good choices for them. It’s like frequent flyer miles for them, and we get to keep them in our little ecosystem. You’re building a relationship with players, and for those players to have a great time as they invest in their hobby. The problem is, you don’t know what they’re doing across games, and you can’t really track them across platforms… What LootLocker has is a way to identify people and have that conversation.”

The democratisation of publisher technology

The key thing here is that building the tech and a strategy to connect players across games and platforms is beyond the reach of most developers. But there are tools that can already do it. And just like there’s no need to build a graphics engine from scratch every time, we’re now seeing back-end tools being commoditised too. 

“Most of the successful games are powered by Unity or Unreal,” says Bergendahl. “I think backends will eventually be the same, where people realise there's no point building something, because LootLocker’s already done it. For developers without a lot of resources, they don't need a dedicated engineering department to do all that work. For publishers, they have a great way to engage their marketing, sales, customer support and community management teams with an actual tool that brings them all together, sharing the same data set, working together with the same tool.”

“A lot of smaller publishers (and I don’t mean this condescendingly) haven’t had that option before,” adds Lander. “So much of our work with developers and publishers has been about opening a door they didn’t even know existed. It reflects a wider industry trend: the reduction of barriers and the democratisation of the whole value chain. These are tools and techniques that were once the preserve of companies like Bethesda, EA, or Ubisoft, where you’d need to spend millions to build them. Now they’re off-the-shelf systems. When you look at something like LootLocker, the infrastructure and the effort that you need to put in now can be treated like you’re using Unreal or Unity. It gives you a good framework. It gives you accounts, and the legal and the data compliance, and all of those things you need.”

Alexander Bergendahl moderates a panel in London this year, talking lessons from two generations of CEOs.

Bergendahl’s team has built two new tools recently to add to this. One is a deeper connection with Discord. “We've invested time into authentication, so you can offer your players to connect their Discord ID to the ID they're playing the game through,” he explains, “So then you have a link where a player in your Discord is an actual player of your game.”

And secondly, a new feature called Broadcasts. Bergendahl explains: “It’s great for multi-game studios or publishers. You can push messages into your game to be displayed wherever you want. And you can also target multiple games at once, so you can have a cohesive message across your catalogue. And soon you'll be able to segment that based on cohort data, playtime, platform or region and so on.”

The road ahead

As the company announces $2.5 million in new funding and now with Lander on board, what’s next for LootLocker? It all comes back to Bergendahl’s philosophy of connecting, engaging, and rewarding players – especially evolving “the publisher angle”. The connect pillar is already in place with the back-end, so now he’s focusing on the engage and reward pillars. He recognises publishers can do a lot more, especially with their back catalogues. 

“They have to start building a connected community,” acknowledges Bergendahl. “And they don’t yet have the tools to go into their back catalogue and their player base that already exists there and say, ‘You're going to like this game, because it's very similar. Join us during Next Fest and get a reward when the game comes out!’ We are interested in exploring that further. We're already starting to work with some publishers, and we're excited to learn about what challenges they face.

“We talk a lot internally about the player journey. A player might have played one game on Steam, but they also might have played another game from that same publisher on Xbox. Can we link those players together so that they're one player? Those are the features we're building out right now.”

Newly appointed Jonathan Lander also thinks there’s an opportunity to explore new demographics and build connected portfolios for them. “Imagine a publisher building a portfolio of games for Gen Alpha players,” he says. “You can use LootLocker’s tools to connect that audience across titles, helping players find experiences they love and helping developers focus on what really matters. That’s a trend we’re going to have to see more of.

“If you look at Gen Alpha, outside of Roblox and Fortnite, there’s actually very little. That’s fertile ground. The industry’s real issue is that too many people are chasing the same players and the same amount of dollars. We’ll need to see commoditisation and see better use of portfolios and smarter publishing strategies to survive. Developers need to focus on finding an audience that genuinely wants to play them.”

If LootLocker’s plan succeeds, publishers may finally stop treating every new release as a reset and start treating their catalogues as living ecosystems.